This article was taken from the July 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by ...

A new paper provides robust evidence for a homogeneous universe when viewed at large scales. The finding validates a number of assumptions made by general relativity. A new paper provides robust ...

This is a smooth fractal, halfway between fractals and ordinary surfaces. Just as a terrestrial globe cannot be flattened without distorting the distances, it seemed impossible to visualize ...

Fractals have become a common sight ... coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line." The chaos and irregularity of the world - Mandelbrot ...

Why are artists so interested in fractal images? “Because they are very striking,” Davis said. “I guess you can like things that are perfectly simple and smooth, and they do have a certain ...

You can make a fractal by taking a smooth shape, breaking the surface into pieces, arrange those pieces in a self similar pattern, and repeating…similar to how we made the Koch Curve.

The geometry that you learned in school was about how to make shapes; fractal geometry is no different. While the shapes that you learned in classical geometry were ‘smooth’, such as a circle ...

A lot of times my moves didn’t get any response from the fractal, and the few times it did the changes were jerky and sudden. Even when I moved my arm in one smooth motion, the fractal tree ...

Then you see smooth matter whose features no longer match those of the individual molecules. The degree of fine structure we see depends on our magnification—in contrast to fractals, where self ...

But if you look around us, almost everything industrial is very smooth, round, flat, corrugated, and so on. Now that is changing. Engineers everywhere know how to use fractals. Q: Even medicine is ...

In other words, a fractal is a complex shape produced from very simple rules; one which, no matter how far you “zoom in”, will never get any simpler nor more smooth than how it started ...

Fractals are exquisite structures produced by ... you should end up with a number of sharp corners connected by smooth lines. To show it could be done, the German mathematician Karl Weierstrass ...